


To Walk the World

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 13:43:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/711385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things Zoe won't accept.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Walk the World

_So haunt me, and hurt me,  
Deceive me, desert me.  
I'm yours till I die.  
So in love, so in love, so in love with you am I_ (from "Kiss Me Kate")

 _To die will be an awfully big adventure._ ("Peter Pan"—the play)

1  
When Zoe was a kid, she had (and her niece Bernetta could probably produce it to embarrass her, because she inherited a lot of the stuff from the house where Zoe's parents moved once they left off Ship life) a notebook marked "Zoe Alleyne, Girl Detective."   
So it was satisfying that when Zoe figured out what to do, everybody helped. And, of all people, it was Jayne who provided some of the best clues.

2  
Inara's red candleholder, with its long line of candles not-quite-straight, had been sent to the Training House. She browbeat Jayne into whittling a replacement, and every Thursday she marched them all into the shuttle and handed each of them a candle and made them light it. 

Zoe always went first. "Hoban Washburn. The blessed dead."

Jayne got to go next, by friendsright. "Derrial Book. The blessed dead." Mal didn't want to but Inara browbeat him too, and anyhow nobody said anything about God, so he lit his candle and put it in the holder and said, "The 57th. Good men and woman all. Leastways now they're gone." Simon meant "Lawrence Dobson," but said, "The patients of Capital City Memorial Hospital who didn't make it. The blessed dead." And at first they gasped when River said "The Reavers" but they were used to it by now. And Kaylee said "Grampy Vic and Nana Gertie. The blessed dead." And then Inara lit the other 15 candles, specifically for the people of Miranda but really, they make those candelabra so wide because there's no one who has gone unmarked by death. 

When Jayne found out she was going to make them hold hands, he always made sure to stand between Kaylee and Inara. That worked out fine, though, because Kaylee held on to Simon's hand. And of course he gave his other hand to River who grabbed on to Mal who, naturally, held Zoe's hand. It was almost, Inara thought, as if she were doing the place cards for a seated dinner. "They are never lost as long as they are in our hearts," Inara said. 

{{That's not good enough,}} Zoe thought. {{That's not **fucking** good enough.}}

3  
They were pretty much parked on Plastaugh—ugly little place, but it had 183 days sunshine out of 279 a year, and those for whom "working on a tan" was a genetic option didn't have the energy to do much else. They were working a scam Simon thought up, which was enthusiastically adopted because they could do it sitting down. 

Most of the people they met had more names than one, and a compelling interest in staying under the radar, or at least getting the record of someone other than themselves added to when they were bound by law. So there was a market for medium-quality phony I.D.s. As they proved during their trip to Ariel, even working at cross-purposes they could come up with ones that worked if no one looked too closely. River was a good-enough hacker when she put her mind to it.

"Poor old Book," Jayne said, neatly knife-trimming a passport photograph. "Never got to have any fun in his Shepherding. You an' Wash, rest him, was married already, and Kaylee and Simon don't even seem like to jump the broom, much less make it legal. No babies to baptize. Nothin' to do but read the service over dead folks. And he did seem to take it personal, when there were dead folks about. That thing he said, when we went to Haven…'Forgive what you can, and send me on my path. I will walk on, until you bid me rest.'"

"Walkin,'" Kaylee said sadly, looking up from the pad of paper where she was writing down phony names. She had a gift for coming up with names and background details that sounded solidly real. "That was practically the first thing Preacher ever said to me—even before that he had that strawberry as a persuasion piece—that he was out of the Abbey to walk the world awhile." 

Zoe could almost hear something click into place, but it wasn't quite there yet.

4  
Zoe decided that it was about time she stopped feeling sorry for herself and confronted the real situation. However little joy she got out of it, she was still alive. She was just a few years older than he had been, although more just a few years than she told him. Wash, who had gotten more joy out of less than anyone she had ever known, was not. Demographically, he had been shafted out of about ninety years of good times. By the law of averages there would have had to be some bad times in there too. And their way of life had a way of clipping the demographics short anyway. It was still a gorram rip-off and she demanded a recount.

An exorcism was how you got rid of a ghost. What kind of inorcism did you do when you wanted to **get** one?

She wished she could ask Book about it. She had a feeling that just as he knew a good bit about Crime, he probably had a few things up the sleeve of his clericals that weren't strictly orthodox. 

She and Jayne were dropping off a baker's dozen of assorted phony passports when he got reminiscent again. "Last time we saw Book, at that weird-ass town o'his, wasn't it funny the way he had his hair done up? What do you folks call that?"

"Cornrows," she said, too tired to take him up on it and anyway it might have been an honest request for information; stranger things had happened.

"Even though it was all twisted up, didn't look like he still had all the hair that spooked off River that time. Do you think he left off Shepherding? 'Cause I thought the deal was, apart from what-all else they wasn't allowed to do, they hadda not cut their hair long as they lived."

"Huh," said Zoe. {{Set a thief to catch a thief}} Zoe thought.

5  
"Guess you know where I want to go," Zoe told River. "Saves time anyway."

"It's just a place, you know," River said. "Not a typographical error."

"I'll take my chances," Zoe said.

"Go get some sleep," River said. "It'll take me at least six hours to get us there."

"Some hope!" Zoe said, but in fact she did sleep, whether because she was exhausted or relaxed and hopeful.

6  
Mal awoke, reassured by the hum of the engines until he realized that he hadn't told anybody to take his boat any-damn-where. 

"River, whatinhell are you doin'?"

"In a caavern! In a caaanyon! Excavating for a mine!" River sang. "More things than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Oh, wait till you see the look that's going to be on Simon's face."

River stood up, stretched, and unhooked the Comm speaker. "Zoe, get prettied up, we're nearly there."

7  
They stepped down on Haven, and it was as if they walked back into the past—walked back farther than the history they dreaded. Or maybe it was journalism they walked into—the last time they were there and recorded the dead. 

The sun was shining, and the trees were in leaf, and the soil was springy with grass, not profaned with twisted wrecks. A little boy came running, and Kaylee picked him up and twirled him around, just like before…and then she dropped him and her mouth dropped open, because she had cried a bucket when…

"Kswaani, I helped bury you!" she said.

He bounced up, rubbing his bottom where he fell. "Yeah. Again. It gets real old." 

They walked a little further, and they smelled cigar smoke. The stogie Jayne gave him, and that Book had taken a few puffs on and had saved for later, was nearly finished, now that it was later. 

"Damn, Preacher!" Jayne said. "Woulda brought you some more—woulda give you my very last smoke—if I'd know we was comin' here. Or that you'd be here to be seen, even knowin' that."

"Whu—I ain't seein' this," Mal said. "You, Shepherd, I know for a fact, are dead." 

"Well, yes," Book said. "But that's been true long before you first met me. Which is as well, because I'm sure that Dobson would have cudgelled me to death…or that bullet on Jiangyin would have killed me."

"So what was the deal with your card? These old eyes wouldn't let me read the little print upside-down all that ways away."

"Oh, they saw my date of death, of course. Say what you like about the Alliance, they're Confucian enough not to fuck with the Ancestors. And, although I'm nobody's grandpa, I surely am an Ancestor. At any rate, you've been dead yourself, Mal. It's hardly an exclusive fraternity." 

"You can't be dead, 'cause I seen you and—well, I don't know if I touched you, must have done some time. And I seen you eat. Cook and eat too. Other end of the process, well, I wouldn't want to know anyhow."

"Why do you think people leave Offerings for the dead?"

"So the priests can come back and eat 'em up their ownselves, of course."

"I can see that you need some of those sermons you were so ready to hear when you thought there was no risk of having to do so."

"Well, Simon paid up his markers with Kaylee like the very fine gentleman he is…maybe you'd better give him a few sermons." {{No point in sermonizing at Kaylee, she's just bein' natural.}}

"There's the one I preached as part of my doctoral defense," Book said. "It's a comparison of thirty-seven Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts to determine the identity of the Earth-that-Was "rock vulture" and "rock badger" that are Levitically forbidden. Takes two hours, that is if I don't allow any time for laughter and applause. Oh, it's a honey."

"Well, Preacher," Zoe said, "Seeing you look so well's better than a sharp stick in the eye, but…you know what I came here for. Can I get it?"

"Surely," Book said, and Wash walked over, yawning, his first cup of coffee of the morning barely tasted.

"Don't ever leave me again, Baby," Zoe said. 

"I think it's only fair to point out that all the leaving was in fact done by you," Wash said. "You think I wanted to go anywhere? Much less via standby on Harpoon Express? Lousy legroom and they lose your luggage, and they couldn't do a Crazy Ivan to save your life…"

"Just tell me what to do and I'll stick by you in any World."

Simon stretched his arms out just as Kaylee threw herself into them and thoroughly drenched his shirt. 

River crouched down on a tuffet of grass and began playing jacks with Kswaani (she carried the jacks and the ball in a pocket tied to the drawstring of her skirt).

Zoe threw her arms around Wash's neck and burrowed her face against the collar of his shattering shirt. Passing Over didn't seem to have improved his taste any. He dipped his knees, put down the coffee mug, put an arm under her knees, and carried her down the corridor. She swung her legs around his waist while he opened one of the doors and carried her over the threshold. 

Jayne opened his mouth but didn't get to say anything before River said, "Oh, don't look at him like that. You're **all** wondering if a live gal can get sexed up by a ghost, it's just that he's the only one who'd say it."

" **You** ain't wonderin'?" Mal asked.

"I'm not telling," River said. "Of course, I **know**."

8  
Simon went over to Shepherd Book. "I didn't want to get into an argument with you while you were still alive, but…really. Concepts of the Afterlife. Just a denial response, the human psyche is unwilling to cope with the reality of death…"

"I'd like to help you out, son," Book said. "But then my advice wouldn't be worth much if I'm not here."

"What do you think about this, Jayne?" Mal asked.

Jayne shrugged. "I seen plenty o'weird shit, a little more don't mean much. Anyway, sayin' we go from nothin' to nothin', what way is that better?"

9  
"You know, Mal," Wash said, settling back down into the repaired cockpit, glad to be back but his not-flesh creeping considering that he had died there, "You're pretty much in the same predicament as those cortecasts I liked—no, not those cortecasts—the funny ones, you know? Where the hero has looked on the wine when it is red and accordingly is thoroughly trashticulated and the only one who can operate the mule is, whatever, blind or a dog or something. Because said party of the second part may be canine or blind but, nevertheless, is sober."

"Hell, Mal," Jayne said. "Get piloted for by a dead guy or a crazy girl? No contest."

"This still ain't…" Mal began.

"Yeah, I know, only way for us to commence to voting on a regular basis would be if one o'the dead guys was you."

Mal gazed at him appraisingly, trying to figure out if he would have been more or less likely to have jacked Jayne out the airlock if he'd known it wouldn't be a keeper. Then he blinked, because Wash was starting to look…sort of translucent.

"You like me, don't you?" Wash said. "From what Zoe said, you've been insulting Jayne for two." 

"Carrying on your legacy. Yes, I did…do?" Simon said. "But I also saw you die. A fact which gives me pause."

"Well, would we be having this conversation, in front of witnesses, if I weren't here? I need your help here, buddy."

"I don't know, I'm sure we'd get at least Jayne's vote and a couple of abstentions about whether I've crashed over the edge to frank psychosis…"

"You can be frank psychosis and I'll be earnest," Jayne offered.

"Discarding observations to conform to preconceptions, Simon? You'd get your grants terminated for far less," River said smugly. 

Simon closed his eyes and tried to focus.

"You have to clap," River said. 

Wash knew that you didn't, but he had sisters too and anyway, it was about time to return to pre-mortem levels of fun. 

Simon began to clap, slowly at first, crescendoing into the greatest standing ovation he had ever given. Kaylee joined him.

Wash's edges solidified, and he clasped his hands around the yoke. Zoe put her hand on his shoulder. "Straight on till mornin'," she said.

**Author's Note:**

>  _It's not on any chart. You must find it with your heart._ (Peter Pan—the musical version)


End file.
